Antiabortion activists in Kansas are stepping up a campaign to drive one of the nation’s last late-term abortion providers out of business.

Dr. George Tiller, who draws patients from across the country to his Wichita clinic, faces trial next month on 19 misdemeanor counts. The charges – which he vigorously disputes – accuse him of aborting viable fetuses without first consulting an independent physician as required by state law.

Each count carries a penalty of up to a year in jail. If convicted, Tiller could also lose his medical license.

His opponents aren’t waiting for the outcome of the trial.

This month, the antiabortion group Kansans for Life submitted nearly 8,000 signatures to Sedgwick County District Court in Wichita, calling for a grand jury to review Tiller’s handling of late-second- and third-trimester abortions. Tiller’s lawyers appealed to federal court to block the grand jury, calling it a “vigilante effort,” but were rebuffed last week. State law allows citizens to force the seating of a grand jury.

At the Capitol, meanwhile, a committee controlled by antiabortion lawmakers held a two-day hearing this month to lay the groundwork for tougher restrictions on abortion. Among the witnesses: a woman who said Tiller rushed her into an abortion at the end of her second trimester without counseling, informed consent or a second opinion because she had arrived late for her appointment at the clinic. State officials said they might investigate those claims.

“This is the beginning of the end for Tiller,” said Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, a Wichita-based antiabortion group.

Kansas law requires any physician who performs an abortion at or after 22 weeks’ gestation to first determine whether the fetus is viable, meaning it could survive outside the womb. Aborting a viable fetus is permitted only if two doctors certify that continuing the pregnancy could kill the woman or cause her “substantial and irreversible” harm to “a major bodily function.” Tiller has reported aborting more than 2,600 viable fetuses since the law took effect in 1998.

His attorneys and supporters say Tiller has done nothing wrong. And some of his patients, expressing deep gratitude for his work, have shared their stories.

At AHeartbreakingChoice.com, several women explain why they traveled to Wichita to abort much-wanted pregnancies, long after they had decorated nurseries and chosen baby names.

“The scan showed that her little brain was severely calcified,” one wrote.

“She would have required a minimum of three surgeries to even enable her to take her first breath,” another said.

The women write that they were well into the second half of their pregnancies, some into the third trimester, before the fetal defects were diagnosed. “I loved and wanted my baby very much,” one wrote. “I loved her so much that I would rather her go back to God than suffer for even one day.”

Tiller also accepts some late-term patients with healthy fetuses. Among them, he has said, have been girls as young as 10, rape victims, alcoholics, drug addicts, and women who were suicidal or depressed or who feared their relatives would harm them if they continued the pregnancy. Tiller has said a few of his patients were just a week or two from their due dates.

AP – Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox plans to resign as John McCain’s state campaign chairman, according to two top Republicans who asked not to be identified because Cox has not yet spoken with McCain in person.

I wonder how the country would have responded if Bill Clinton said after Gulf Vet McVeigh and Army Bud bombed Oklahoma City :

” We are going to hunt down and kill every one of these ideological Right Wing terrorists in our midsts. They often are funded by charity front organizations and we are going to go after them too. CIA operatives vetted for their loyalty to this Administration will begin rendering their ass to torture right off the back nine down before they’re headed down to Guantanamo indefinitely. Either you’re with us or against us.”

Then if he was really skilled, he would incentivize parts of the mil to liquidate ideological adversaries from within…

Sure is same shit different polarity but I think the wingers have been far more skilled in incenting coconspirators —co-opting Dems for example. It is funny the wingers stack every job slot from school board janitor through to Chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Serena Joy is mad as a hatter, Marisacat. There’s definitely something “off” about her. Romney’s got the glint in his eyes, as well.

Lunatics vying to be made head of the asylum, the pair of them.

President Hillary Serena Joy Clinton will patiently–or perhaps not so patiently explain–why she’s terribly sorry, but the Blackwater mercenaries had to use machine guns to mow down all of those demonstrators in (insert name of city where you live) to keep LAW AND ORDER. WE MUST HAVE LAW AND ORDER.

Her husband’s statement after the Oklahoma City bombing, in an interview with Steve Croft of “60 Minutes”:

STEVE CROFT:
…it seems almost certain now that this is “home-grown
terrorism”; that the enemy is, in fact, within. How do we respond
to that?

BILL CLINTON:
Well, we have to arrest the people who did it, we have to put
them on trial, we have to convict them and punish them. I
certainly believe that they should be executed…

MIKE WALLACE:
…Are we Americans going to have to give up some of our
liberties in order better to combat terrorism? Both from overseas
and here?

BILL CLINTON:
Mike, I don’t think we have to give up our liberties, but I do
think we have to have more discipline. And we have to be willing
to see serious threats to our liberties properly investigated. I
have sent a “counter-terrorism” piece of legislation to Capitol
Hill, which I hope Congress will pass. And after consultation
with the attorney general and the FBI director and others, I’m
going to send some more legislation to Congress to ask them to
give the FBI and others more power to crack these terrorist
networks — both domestic and foreign.

And so it began.

Pay close attention to whom Serena Joy chooses as her Minister for Internal Security, aka Attorney General. That person will be in charge of distributing jackboots and truncheons.

As for the Kosswhackians: Most of them betray a suburbanite mentality. You’d never know Kos, for example, lives in Berkeley: he may as well live in some hick town in Kentucky. It’s some sort of sick joke that Kos lives in a centre of lefty liberalism, I’m sure. He’s out of place there as I would be performing in a ballet recital (FYI, I do wear a leotard and tutu, but strictly for comfort around the house).

The lies, the ordinary people who walked to the political headquarters of Aznar’s party and stood in the square…

That was inspirational. Millions just seemed to go out in the streets spontaneously and demand that they not be lied to! I kept a newspaper photo of them for a long time, to remind myself that I had once hoped it would happen here.

It reminded me of Venezuela after the people found out about the coup!

We are missing something here, I don’t know what it is. Maybe the country is just too big.

*******

Anti, as marisicat said, elise is a bit limited in the thinking department. If she is an operative for Obama, she needs to reveal that. I thought they had some kind of ‘rule’ about it. Of course she may have, I haven’t been there for a while.

They are going to end up with no one on that blog by the time the primaries are over. I can’t figure out why it’s so important to fight so hard for any candidate. Unless, as you say, you’re being paid to do so. But then, being a horror of a bully doesn’t do the candidate much good.

Earth to Obama, elise will turn more people away then you can afford right now! Lol! Someone needs to tell him. Three people who would be the death of any campaign, DHinMi, MissLaura and Elise. A few others I can think of also.

Hm, I thought it was illegal to use the US military for domestic law enforcement? Well, if the President does it, it can’t be illegal. I learned that from Richard Nixon:

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release April 20, 1993

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
IN QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION WITH THE PRESS

The Rose Garden

Q Can you describe what she told you on Sunday about the nature of the operation and how much detail you knew about it?

The third question I asked was, has the military been consulted? As soon as the initial tragedy came to light in Waco, that’s the first thing I asked to be done, because it was obvious that this was not a typical law enforcement situation. Military people were then brought in, helped to analyze the situation and some of the problems that were presented by it. And so I asked if the military had been consulted. The Attorney General said that they had, and that they were in basic agreement that there was only one minor tactical difference of opinion between the FBI and the military — something that both sides thought was not of overwhelming significance.

Q Can you address the widespread perception — reported widely, television, radio and newspapers — that you were trying somehow to distance yourself from this disaster?

I will say this, however. I was, frankly, surprised would be a mild word, to say that anyone that would suggest that the Attorney General should resign because some religious fanatics murdered themselves. (Applause.)

I regret what happened, but it is not possible in this life to control the behavior of others in every circumstance. These people killed four federal officials in the line of duty. They were heavily armed. They fired on federal officials yesterday repeatedly, and they were never fired back on. We did everything we could to avoid the loss of life. They made the decision to immolate themselves. And I regret it terribly, and I feel awful about the children.

Well, 79 people were killed, 21 of them children, but Clinton only feels bad about the 21 children. Bugger the 58 adults. And Clinton feels “awful” about the children but, you know, they had to be killed to protect them from abuse by those weird cultists who have sex with women to whom they’re not married.

Have to wonder if paid operatives at dKos are worth the money. They take up space and oxygen but doubt they are effective at influencing anybody. Nothing but a bunch of choirs all singing to themselves. Soto is falling into the same trap with Jeff and himself carry the Hillary banner (he always has appallingly bad taste when he chooses to support a candidate – not talking out of school, have already said it to him – he does some good analyses but then draws conclusions not supported by his analysis.)

Maybe this country needs a really good depression to take our minds off all this stupid crap that we fight endlessly about. When nobody can afford to feed another mouth, abortion will be a socially responsible act. Of course all when all the violent, white authoritarian men are hungry they’ll be even more dangerous. That might move me to support getting guns and take them out,

There will be no winner in ’08. It’s all so banal. Just like Alexis Debat proved to be (and I had such high hopes that this was a big, interesting story). My write-up, very boring because it was the only way to fit all the pieces together– is at TLC.

#15 – Sabrina – no rule about covert ops at dKos. In fact Kos coddled those like DH and was uninterested when I suggested a community standard on this that ops should disclose that information (only party affilition , who they support for POTUS , and that they work on the inside — wasn’t even demanding that they disclose their identity or who they work for unless it is a POTUS candidate then the disclosure is relevant.

How did those in Spain organize? Probably their cell phones and internet which may be more technologically advanced than what we have here. We have all the tools necessary to mobilize within twenty-four hours but we don’t have the will.

Is not Kos’s paid work for Dean a subject of journalism these days? Francis Holland has covered all the damaging news reports on Kos’s venality. Holland also has found a homophobic piece Kos published in 1993.

I have a question: since when has Chris Bowers become Mr. Open Left? Was he not the one who said he would rather have a standard Democrat in the Senate than Bernie Sanders? Where do these guys get off?

Rev–They have petitioned in the past and been turned down. Last petition drive was in 2005 and they got turned down flat. The prince in charge of such matters said dismissively, “We have other priorities. This is not a concern of ours.”

Also, Saudi women still cannot go out in public without being accompanied by a male relative.

The school’s chancellor flies east to re-recruit the legal scholar, whom he had earlier fired.
By Garrett Therolf and Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
September 18, 2007
UC Irvine’s chancellor tried to salvage the reputation of his fledgling law school Monday by announcing that he had reinstated Erwin Chemerinsky as its founding dean, but his own troubles persisted as faculty members continued to question why he had sacked the liberal scholar and contemplated taking action against their university’s leader.

The agreement with Chemerinsky, made five days after the deanship was rescinded, came after Chancellor Michael V. Drake and his wife flew to Durham, N.C., over the weekend so the two men could speak face to face.

In a conference call with reporters, the chancellor and new dean agreed that Chemerinsky would enjoy absolute academic freedom and would continue to write opinion articles on a wide range of issues, not just legal education as Drake suggested last week.

“Chancellor Drake reaffirmed in the strongest possible way the academic freedom that I would have, as all deans and faculty members do,” Chemerinsky said. He later noted that he was aware that his role as dean also would require him to build a broad base of support. Before he was ousted, the dean had sought conservatives for some slots on his board of advisors.

From The LA Times.

Looks like those Orange County “John Wayne Republicans” are losing their touch. They got steamrollered by a pantywaist intellectual liberal type.

Anybody who needs further proof beyond what Moulitsas has written on his blog and said in public interviews that he is NOT a political progressive has rocks in their head.

Holland has not convinced anyone who was not already convinced. I’d wager that the vast majority of Kos Kultists are PLEASED with the notion that Il Kosolini is a CIA mole, and agree with his homophobic stand against gays serving openly in the US military.

moiv — its one of my daily morning reads….but i sense you are into to some of that stuff. a lot of the other stuff aside from the daily news is just people trying to sell books rather than real investigation.

It makes sense Kos is a homophobe, although one wonders about him and Jerome Armstrong. And the misogyny: notice how his wife has been relegated to the task of operating Mother Talkers. According to Moulitsas, all women are mothers and talkers. Politics is the realm of men, “straight” men.

They link to all sorts of things, don’t they? This kind of real investigation I do find interesting.

Jessica Utts, professor of statistics at UC Davis, has been one of the few statisticians to work in the field of parapsychology, analyzing data and helping with experimental design. Gathering statistics for parapsychology still uses the same methods, Utts said.

“As a statistician we can work on data in any field and it’s still the same statistical methods,” she said.

Utts earned a bachelor’s degree in math and psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1973 and a doctorate in statistics from Penn State University in 1978. She has since worked as a professor and statistician at UC Davis, catching a few breaks to work as a visiting professor at Stanford University and as a senior research fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

In 1995, Utts was hired by the American Institutes of Research, an independent research firm, along with psychologist Ray Hyman from the University of Oregon to analyze data from a 20-year research program sponsored by the U.S. government to investigate paranormal activity.

:::

The research program involved remote viewing, in which test subjects were asked to describe or draw an unknown target. The target could be anything and could be located anywhere. According to Utts’ meta-analysis of the 966 studies performed at Stanford Research Institute, subjects could identify the target correctly 34 percent of the time. The probability of these results occurring by chance is .000000000043.

Utts compared these results to a similar meta-analysis of aspirin treatment for heart disease. In 2002, researchers published a meta-analysis in the British Medical Journal of 188 studies. The results demonstrated that aspirin reduced the number of heart attacks in people likely to have heart disease by 25 percent, with a probability of it occurring by chance equaling .0003.

“The evidence for [remote viewing] is much stronger than [aspirin preventing heart attacks] and yet we have people taking aspirin everyday to try to prevent heart attacks,” Utts said. “People aren’t willing to either look at this evidence or aren’t willing to believe it when they see it.”

Stanford-based researchers have been studying “remote viewing” for about 30 years now. I wonder why.

Marie, did you get my email last night? I sent it and it came back (wrong address, my fault). Anyway, I did read the Debat piece. I wouldn’t say it is not interesting although I think those rightwiingers who hired him are more interesting. I was not aware that our ‘liberal’ news media hired people to report on such important matters as foreign policy, especially now, from Rightwing think tanks.

Re Holland, his main problem is his sensational ediitorializing. He has dug up some information that wasn’t out there and that does raise timeline questions re what kos has said publicly and what the facts appear to be. Eg, when he was in the CIA training program. Something doesn’t match there. But he could straighten it out if it was just bad communication skills,

Then there’s the fact that the college records are all back online, except the letter from kos re gays in the military, last I heard. But if he stuck to the imformation, and left the rest to those who read it, he’d be better off.

He has written a few diaries on other topics. One that I liked was about his childhood.

Sabrina – no didn’t get your e-mail. Re: Debat – he didn’t work for any rightwing think tanks. That was one of my points. Of course those are of two types: the christian fundamentalist variant that came of age with the Bush Admin. Then the Neo-cons, Heritage, AEI etc. The first will take anybody, but not so with the second, they are fussy. Debat was going for the second but it takes years to build up the proper creds for that and he was still at least two years away from that when he got busted. As he wasn’t actually in, they have nothing to run from, but Debat ain’t ever getting into those circles now. He’ll most likely fade away, back to France for a while then perhaps to the outer reaches of the EU or Turkey. That assumes that he hasn’t found a wealthy sweetie in the US, in that case he’ll stay here in obscurity for a couple of years (he would not be a faithful lover and would quickly become bored).

Re Kos. I find speculation that he’s CIA to be as ridiculous as Debat working for the Penagon. If the agency had had any interest in him at all it would have been covering a central american desk. Detailed office work which Kos isn’t good at. Or perhaps in the legal dept, but my guess is that they have stronger applicants for that. Kos told that story to make himself sound interesting and it allows people to speculate that he could be a spook. Sorry, he’s not smart enough for such a job.

Actually when you look at that Kerry video again, that kid looks better.

He cites his source (Greg Palast, a no no on the Daily Kos). He holds the book up so people can see who he’s referring to and check it out for themselves. He gets Kerry to acknowledge it.

That kid was guilty in the eyes of the Dkossers of being an awkward 19 year old and having the awkward body language of a 19 year old kid uncomforable in his body.

I know that TV has taught us that 19 year old kids all look as if they’re 30 and handle themselves like seasoned TV actors but that’s not reality. The “reality based community” doesn’t seem to realize this.

Funny you should mention that, because about 12 years ago when I lived in Delaware, one of the idiots who wrote an opinion column for Wilmington’s incredibly boring daily paper (The News Journal) authored a piece that called for the return of lashing convicts at the whipping post. This punishment had been abolished only in the early 1970s, though by that time it had been 20 years since such a sentence had actually been carried out.

I imagine a lot of people would end up at least tacitly endorsing such a thing if it came to pass.

I refer everyone to the authority on this subject, which would be a Mr. George C. Carlin and his comedy routine on capital punishment.

don’t forget, the polls show the American people want capital punishment, and they want a balanced budget. And I think even in a fake democracy, people ought to get what they want once in a while. Just to feed this illusion that they’re really in charge. Let’s use capital punishment the same way we use sports and television in this country, to distract people and take their minds off how bad they’re being fucked by the upper one percent. Now, unfortunately, unfortunately Monday Night Football doesn’t last long enough. What we really need is year-round capital punishment on TV every night with sponsors. Gotta have sponsors. I’m sure as long as we’re killing people Marlboro Cigarettes and Dow Chemical would be proud to participate! Proud to participate! Balance the stupid fucking budget!!

And- and let me say this to you my interesting judaeo-christian friends. Not only- not only do I recommend crucifixions, I’d be in favor of bringing back beheadings!! Huh? Beheadings on TV, slow-motion, instant replay? And maybe you could let the heads roll down a little hill. And fall into one of five numbered holes. Let the people at home gamble on which hole the head is going to fall into. And you do it in a stadium so the mob can gamble on it too. Raise a little more money. And if you want to expand the violence a little longer to sell a few more commercials, instead of using an axe, you do the beheadings with a hand saw! Hey, don’t bail out on me now, God damnit! The blood is already on our hands, all we’re talking about is a matter of degree. You want something a little more delicate, we’ll do the beheadings with an olive fork. That would be nice. And it would take a good God damn long time. There’s a lot of good things we could be doing.

When’s the last time we burned someone at the stake? It’s been too long! Here’s another form of capital punishment, comes out of a nice, rich, religious tradition. Burning people at the stake. Sponsor: Bridgeford Charcoal. And you put it on TV on Sunday mornings. The Sunday Morning Evangelical Send Us An Offering Praise Jesus Human Bonfire! You don’t think that would get big ratings? In this sick fucking country?! Shit you’d have people skipping church to watch this stuff! And you take the money they send in and the offerings and you use it to balance the budget.

The Sept. 6 attack by Israeli warplanes inside Syria struck what Israeli intelligence believes was a nuclear-related facility that North Korea was helping to equip, according to current and former American and Israeli officials.

Details about the Israeli assessment emerged as China abruptly canceled planned diplomatic talks in Beijing that were to set a schedule to disband nuclear facilities in North Korea. The Bush administration has declined to comment on the Israeli raid, but American officials were expected to confront the North Koreans about their suspected nuclear support for Syria during those talks.

The American and Israeli officials said the Israeli government notified the Bush administration about the planned attack just before the raid. It is not clear whether administration officials expressed support for the action or counseled against it.

The raid has aroused intense speculation in Washington and Jerusalem, but details remain extraordinarily murky. Officials said access to new intelligence about suspected North Korean support to Syria has been confined to a very small group of officials in Washington and Jerusalem.

The details of the Israeli intelligence remain highly classified, and the accounts about Israel’s thinking were provided by current and former officials who are generally sympathetic to Israel’s point of view. It is not clear whether American intelligence agencies agree with the Israeli assessment about the facility targeted in the raid, and some officials expressed doubt that Syria has either the money or the scientific talent to initiate a serious nuclear program.

But current and former American and Israeli officials who have received briefings from Israeli sources said Monday that the raid was an attempt by Israel to destroy a site that Israel believed to be associated with a rudimentary Syrian nuclear program.

So what do we make of this? I can think of any number of reasons this story was allowed to see the light of day, and haven’t the wherewithal to detail them right now. Still, if this is indeed what is going on, mightn’t it be less dangerous and more according to international law to simply make the suspicions about Syria and North Korea public and demand that inspections take place?

This, combined with France’s recent sabre rattling, lead me to suspect that there is indeed going to be more military action in the ME in the near future, with the US attacking Iran and Israel taking on Syria.

I love this unintentionally revealing line in that comment you link to:

Sorry, once that kid mentioned Skull and Bones… (5+ / 0-)

he crossed the realm into tinfoil conspiracy land. Don’t we ban those kinds of people here?

I’m not familiar with this incident, but it sounds like the sort of overreaction that has become SOP for the cops these days. Reminds me of how at one point during the 1968 campaign when Ed Muskie was being heckled by anti-war demonstrators chanting slogans that made it difficult for him to be heard, he turned to them and said that if they’d nominate one or two of their number to state their position, he’d be happy to give them a microphone and answer whatever questions they had for him, or to debate them. The demonstrators did in fact do this, and they ended up having what the press covering the campaign described as an lively and enlightening session. No one’s mind was changed, but the response to this was overwhelmingly positive (a lengthy report on the incident aired on the CBS Evening News that night ), and such give-and-take discussions became a staple of Muskie’s campaign appearances. And mind you, this was only a few months after Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, so a person in Muskie’s position could have been excused for believing that such behavior on their part could end with them being killed. I think the difference between now and then can be very nicely demonstrated by contrasting those incidents.

40, moiv, that is an interesting study. I teach people to develop their psychic/intuitive abilities and one of the things that always blows them away is the exercise in which they take turns telepathically sending visuals of colored shapes (e.g., “blue triangle”) to each other. Some people are better senders than receivers and vice versa, some are better at seeing/sending colors than shapes, etc. But everyone manages to pick up some telepathic info, and often there are people who have a 75% success rate, even before training.

Funky stuff.

I understand the Russians were doing in-depth research on “psi” during the Cold War, particularly remote-viewing. I don’t know where they’re at with that now.

47, Sabrina – re: FLH, yes I liked his diary about the dog. Well actually it was about interracial marriage but he took a detour to talk about a dog. it was much like Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times. FLH should do more of that.

I will be in NYC over Columbus Day weekend taking my son to various touristic destinations and visiting as many restaurants as possible. It will be busy but I plan to meet up with lucid sometime during the weekend. Any other MCatters in the NYC area who would like to join us? Sabrina?

The incident reminded me of something that happened my freshman year. I had left my wallet in the city over the weekend. I went to eat dinner at the drom and the cafeteria lady refused to let me in without it. Now she had seen me 4-5 times a day for 6 months. Knew me by name. But was being a bitch over a plastic card. That was pissing me off but what really was pissing me off is when it clicked that I WAS PAYING for this shit. Paying to attend the school. Paying to live in their dorm and paying for their crappy food.

I didnt make a big scene. I jut kindo of said I am eating and walked in. As I made my way down the bufferline more and more stafflings kept showing up. I just calmly said No I am eating. I sat at the table and the crowd around me kept getting bigger and I was eventually escorted out by the campus police (that is what should be inportant in the Kerry thing, the cops were no better than the people who ask to see your reciepty at best buy). I had to see the head of student housing and eventaully the Dean himself. All because some Jevovahs Witness Lady wanted to power trip on me. I probably would have been tasered today by the time i got to the mashed potatoes.

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. defines concentration camp as: a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45.

The English term “concentration camp” was first used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War. Allegedly conceived as a form of humanitarian aid to the families whose farms had been destroyed in the fighting, the camps were used to confine and control large numbers of civilians as part of a Scorched Earth tactic. The term “concentration camp” was coined at this time to signify the “concentration” of a large number of people in one place, and was used to describe both the camps in South Africa (1899-1902) and those established by the Spanish to support a similar anti-insurgency campaign in Cuba (circa 1895-1898), although at least some Spanish sources disagree with the comparison.

Many would think of the German Third Reich as the first government to use concentration camps to rid themselves of undesirable persons, but during the Second Boer War an estimated 26000 boer woman and children perished in British concentration camps, of which some 100 existed, and almost 14000 native africans who fought with the boers also perished in those same camps, Emily Hobhouse was credited with attempts to inform the world of these inhumanities.

Serious malnutrition and many other reasons can be put forward by historians as explenation for those deaths, but many cases of abuse and rape were reported after the war, and many survivors of those camps reported that their food was regularly supplemented with shattered glas [sic].

The AIPAC/Likud crowd would go absolutely bonkers if anyone were to post about that at any of the BBBs.

In 37 years of public appearances, through wars, protests and highly emotional events, I have never had a dialogue end this way. I believe I could have handled the situation without interruption, but again I do not know what warnings or other exchanges transpired between the young man and the police prior to his barging to the front of the line and their intervention. I asked the police to allow me to answer the question and was in the process of answering him when he was taken into custody. I was not aware that a taser was used until after I left the building. I hope that neither the student nor any of the police were injured. I regret enormously that a good healthy discussion was interrupted.

Everything else outside of that bolded statement is just window- dressing to try and make himself look good. And, frankly, he’s got to be an incredibly self-involved idiot if he couldn’t hear the student crying out not to be tasered and the reaction of the crowd once he was. Then again, he is an incredibly self-involved idiot.

Afghanistan will descend into bloody chaos if Canadian troops and other foreign soldiers are withdrawn too quickly, President Hamid Karzai said today, in a forceful plea for Canadian soldiers to continue fighting after 2009.

Evoking the civil wars that wracked Afghanistan in the early 1990s, killing tens of thousands of people, Mr. Karzai said his country could slip into a similarly dark period if the Canadians withdraw as scheduled in 18 months.

“Afghanistan will fall back into anarchy,” he said. “Anarchy will bring back safe havens to terrorists, among other things, and terrorists will then hurt you back there in Canada and the United States. Simple as that.”

That was a different campaign. Muskie’s chats with antiwar radicals occurred in 1968 when he was Humphrey’s Veep candidate. The incident concerning the guy wearing Hunter T’s press credentials occurred in the 1972 primary campaign. Oddly enough, Muskie’s behavior in 1968 was out of character, he had a volcanic temper that would erupt at the slightest provocation. He was less adept at hiding this in ’72, when he and his wife would often shout at each other in front of reporters interviewing him one-on-one as if they were auditioning for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Apparently, she also had little trouble getting in touch with her anger.

The United States is opposed to Syria attending Washington’s regional peace summit in November, Israeli academics Monday told Haaretz, based on their conversation with a senior U.S. official. The academics say the official described Syria as “a vicious, brutal regime allied to Iran strategically,” which subscribes to “the most barbaric anti-Semitic views.”[bomb bomb bomb Iran -catnip]

But after eleven days of speculations regarding the alleged Israel Air Force strike on Syria, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday that he respects Syrian President Bashar Assad and is ready, given the right conditions, to launch peace talks with Damascus.

“I have a lot of respect for the Syrian leader and for Syria’s conduct. They have internal problems, but we have no reason to rule out dialogue with Syria,” Olmert said in a briefing for Russian-language media outlets in Israel.

“As I’ve said in the past, we want to make peace with everyone,” [right…that’s why you’re still sending the IDF into the occupied territories and planes into Syrian territory. -catnip] Olmert continued. “If the conditions ripen, we are ready to make peace with Syria, with no preconditions and no ultimate demands.”

If the US government would butt out maybe they’d actually get somewhere in the ME. Fighting over who gets to attend a “peace” conference. The irony is apparently not obvious to that “senior US official”.

Sounds exactly like what George Packer said about Iraq in his recent New Yorker article, in which he also held up what we did about organizing a government in Afghanistan after driving out the Taliban as a template we could use in Iraq. What needs to be pointed out over and over is that both countries are in chaos anyway, and that what we’ve done in Iraq is all too like what we did in Afghanistan anyway. As I read the awful future Packer painted of Iraq if we pull out immediately, and what Karzai claims will happen in Afghanistan if Canadian troops don’t stay I found myself thinking “that’s exactly what it’s like now, and one of the reasons for that is the presence of foreign troops.”

During meetings between senior State Department officials and their counterparts in Israel, the Americans said that in recent months there has been a troubling increase in the number of complaints by American citizens of Palestinian and Arab origin, regarding the treatment they receive at border crossings and airports in Israel.

The Americans complained about long delays, a suspicious attitude, and degrading security checks.

The State Department officials stressed that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was very perturbed by this issue and said they expected immediate improvement.

They also warned their Israeli counterparts that unless there was a change, they would update the travel warning for Americans visiting Israel to include a statement that “Israel harasses American citizens of Arab and Palestinian origin.”

What a fucking joke. Not a word about how Palestinians are treated every bloody day.

I mean tto post this a few days ago, Scruggs had a piece on an elderly woman arrested, handcuffed and put in jail for not watering her lawn… in the comments (# 3) is a further Scruggs reference to several instances of elderly (and I do mean elderly) being tasered.

A 71-year-old woman whose prosthetic eye was popped out by officers restraining her was awarded a $145,000 settlement in part because she was also pepper-sprayed and Tasered three times.

The incident began when the woman, Eunice Crowder, challenged city employee Ed Marihart, who was forcibly cleaning up her yard based on a search warrant. Marihart called 911 and officers Robert Miller (#38512) and Eric Zajac (#3783) arrived. One of the officers struck her in the head, causing her false eye to come out. According to the April 23 Oregonian, police admitted pushing her into the dirt.

Zajac Tasered her in the back twice and once in the breast. Crowder’s 94-year-old mother, who came out and tried to let them know Crowder was hearing and vision-impaired, was not harmed. A judge dismissed charges against Crowder of harassment and interfering with a police officer.

And he has a hoot of piece up on Kerry today… a snip he uses refers to Kerry as a “odd bit of Duchampian machinery” (applause on that one!)…

snip from the snip:

The man is droning on and on and on and on (off-screen) as this boy is being tasered. (It is as though Kerry was possessed by Biden’s ghost or something. with all due respect to the senator from Delaware. ) But really — It has the quality of a semi-inspired Monty Python skit, or it would have if it weren’t so upsetting! In the end, it’s more Pinter than Python. Kerry goes on like the odd bit of Duchampian machinery he is. (Think of the useless invention in “The Large Glass” – and you have Kerry.) It’s a very powerful non-image; this disembodied blathering of the perfectly hapless politico as the protestor screams in agony and rage and gets tortured by people in uniform.

President George W Bush goes to New York next week for the annual United Nations General Assembly to ratchet up the demonization of Iran, confident that his new French ally is doing “a heck of a job”. President Nicolas Sarkozy – widely referred to in Paris as King Sarko the First – has let loose the dogs of war with more panache than a madame from the chic seventh arrondissement parading her miniature Pinscher.

Exhibit A of why I laugh at the puffery of ‘medical science’. If you have any knowledge of statistics, when you really start reading these studies and compare the conclusions to the data, you inevitably end up scratching your head and thinking – ‘how the hell did they prove that from the data’?

LOL I never saw anyone taken with the disease shake it off. And I have been at odds with America all my life… fully at odds. But gee, I am an American. I don’t care where I am, what happens here matters.

bTW, in the election of Sarko the First.. it was the first time that non resident French – those would be EX PATS! – were allowed to vote. They lined up around the block here at the Alliance Francaise… and of course they voted in Israel as well. And elsewhere.

Presto, you get that asshole in. Not that Segolene was a peach, she was not.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) went after fellow Democrat Jim Moran of Virginia Tuesday, calling on him to retract his comments about the Israel lobby.

“His remarks were factually inaccurate and recall an old canard that is not true, that the Jewish community controls the media and the Congress,” Hoyer said at a news conference in the Capitol.

In an interview published in the September-October issue of Tikkun magazine, Moran said the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, “has pushed this war from the beginning … They are so well-organized, and their members are extraordinarily powerful — most of them are quite wealthy — they have been able to exert power.”

Asked if he considered Moran’s remarks anti-Semitic and if he should apologize, Hoyer reiterated that he found them “factually inaccurate” and said Moran should “retract” them.

In a statement issued by Moran’s office, the congressman admitted that the tone of his remarks were “unnecessarily harsh” but stood by his statements that AIPAC does not represent “mainstream American Jewish opinion.”

#93. Well, he’s certainly a fool to think that the couple of thousand of Canadian troops there right now are making such a huge difference in the scheme of things or that when they leave in 2009, when the current mandate expires, that Afghanistan will suddenly go to helena handbasket. Like Iraq, it’s already there.

Many activists have worked tirelessly to stop a war with Iran, others have been working since 2000 to fix our electoral system, and countless others have tried to open up our political system by Crashing the Gate. How does supporting an hysterical conspiracy theorist and having to defend him in the MSM help any of those causes?

Making Andrew Meyer a cause-celebre undermines the legitimacy of what we stand for. It cheapens our efforts to lump ourselves in with someone who disrupts an event to push his own agenda. And rather than focusing on these legitimate issues, the media gets to blame the “dirty, fucking hippies” again for their actions rather than focus on the actions of our corrupt, incompetent public officials.

So while some see Meyer as a kindred spirit standing up to the Man, I see him as no more than a Republican heckler looking to undermine all of our beliefs. And I welcome his actions no more than I would a member of UF’s College Republicans disrupting the event to ask about Kerry’s Vietnam service.

Shades of attacking Cindy Sheehan. Just proclaim that “he’s not one of US!” and throw him off the Great Orange Boat.

I wonder how many leftover Kerry operatives there are over there.

Just what the hell do they “stand for” over there anyway besides mediocrity, complacency and the status quo?

It’s deleted now but the day after the march in DC on NYC Indymedia one of the regular anti-semitic trolls called “no war for Israel” got careless and posted a link to the Frontpage attack on Cindy (the one about how the terrorists personally thanked her).

Oooops. Mr. Frontpage Zionazi Troll needs to learn to use two browsers when he pretends he’s a Stromfront troll.

His usual fare is stuff like “Norman Finkelstein is the only Jew we can trust. David Duke loves him”. Stuff like that.

Daily Kos users are some of the most complacent, undereducated, sheltered and easily duped people online. They have nothing of substance to offer, and they quote the book ghostwriters wrote on behalf of Markos Zuniga as if it were the Bible.

The only gate the crashed was the one protecting me and others from their venom.

To them the only legitimate form of activism involves sending a $25 donation to Tammy Duckworth.

I saw a tape where he was pulling of his other little push backs. Standing on a corner holding a sign: Harry dies

when the last Potter book came out.

i champion that sort of thing. Anyway it is MINOR. People act there never has been, never should be a hard or truculent or invasive question at a rally. That there never should be a “bad” moment for the Roman senate.

And really, by now, who the fuck is Kerry? nobody. A useless memeber of a disgusting body.

Beats invading and killing and cluster bombing and napalming and releasing masses of DU.

Humorous are the petty battles over healthcare at Daily Kos. Poll after poll reveals how irrelevant those people are, as Clinton continues to surge despite all their little efforts. You would think the operatives there would know how to read a poll.

That’s right. #5. The largest, most violent student protests in American history took place in 1963 against letting James Meridith register. Klansmen from all over the region drove into town. A general (Edwin Walker) helped organize the riots and was later charged with conspiracy to committ insurrection.

It overwhelmed the National Guard and they had to call in regular troops.

It made Chicago, the FSM, the march on the Pentagon, all of them look tame.

In other words, the right’s always mobilized more people into the streets and has done more civil disobedience than the left. Think of the anti-abortion movement. Abortion isn’t hard to get in “red” America because people voted. It’s hard to get because of street protests.

The right’s outnumbered NOW (with their guy in the White House). They even need a special police moblization in conservative Morristown NJ to protect their anti-immigrant protest.

But if Hillary gets in office?

To quote Lyndon Johnson. “Who cares about the punks on the campuses. The great beast in the American right”.

we are so in the big clogged storm drain – that leads off the messy filthy smelly gutter we’ve been in for years, filled with blood and body parts…

from the Hill (think catnip linked to it upthread)

Antonio Perez, the chairman and CEO of Kodak who has contributed to Clinton’s campaign this year, praised her plan in Monday’s release: “Senator Clinton’s healthcare reform plan recognizes that managing and financing America’s healthcare system is a shared responsibility between government, business and individuals.”

Right. And S-chip is a big battle – both sides – and there is not and never will be, at the least, 100% coverage for catastrophic illness.

Did you see the video clip of her on Maher’s show last week where she said she consulted with (what seemed like THOUSANDS) of advisors before she voted on the AUMF? She didn’t exactly mention that she never read the NIE.

Well the extreme tension between Establishment Dems and any sign of human life is why I think they will do anything to cast off the so called and the real anti war left. (I think the MoveOn ad is very suspicious, a set up, MoveOn could not care less about the war or the generals or anything but $$$$)

LOL I don’t think either or any of them even read the SUMMARY. Edwards could nto be bothered to show up for the Intell Committee… Kerry hoped ot burnish his CV for pres (and is unable to explain a NO vote for GW1 with a YES vote for IW) and Hillary was for the war, fully.

I tihnk Mayer was on an FU (meaning Florida U in thsi case, LOL) list. The only thing that makes sense. Or there was a signal from a Kerry operative in the audience when the question was what it was and the Palast book was sighted.

If this guy was really being disrupted wouldn’t the crowd have just shouted him down and told him to get out?

And if they THOUGHT he was worthy of tazering and DIDN”T shout him down long before that, isn’t THAT a problem?

If you’re so totally passive that you need cops and tazers to protect your “community” aren’t you already slaves?

Maybe being from NYC has warped my perspective. People here have no trouble saying “sit down and shut the fuck up” if they think someone’s being disrupted.

I was riding a NJ transit train a few days ago and this early 20ish black guy (don’t know if i need to specify race or not) has his loud ass speaker phone on and he’s ostantiously talking into it to let us all know that, hey, he has a cool cell phone.

It lasted about 5 seconds. A woman just walked up to him and said “turn your speaker off asshole” and he did.

HC – the audience seemed to cheer a bit when the goons went after the guy. Otherwise they were completely well trained in the art of passivity. TV is probably the best insructor for that that the world has ever seen.

The wingnuts more than anyone else wants this story to go away because it has them tied up in knots.

Alright, I’m the Online Communications Director for John Kerry, and I wanted to jump in here to let all of y’all know about what happened yesterday at the University of Florida event. JK himself wanted to stop by, but he’s stuck in Senate business all day and won’t have a chance to respond to any comments.

PLA LEEZE

Why is it that when one of Kerry’s interns posts “his” diaries he/she usually pretends it’s from Kerry himself.

Now Kerry’s staffer identifies herself as a Kerry staffer.

How much do you want to be this is the same person who posts Kerry’s diaries when Kerry posts his own diaries?

Just another example of Kerry’s cowardnice.

Get up in front of a mike and a crowd of journalists and take your punishment war hero or just retire already.

After weeks of suggesting Democrats would temper their approach to Iraq legislation in a bid to attract more Republicans, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared abruptly Tuesday that he had no plans to do so.

So.

Former University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing has been released on a $1 million bail after pleading not guilty to the murder of Sam DuBose. Tensing, who is white, fatally shot the 43-year-old African-American man on July 19 after stopping him for not having a front license plate. Two additional officers, Phillip Kidd and David Lindenschmidt, hav […]

As the Senate prepares to vote to defund Planned Parenthood, we look at the Center for Medical Progress, the anti-choice group behind the attacks on Planned Parenthood. The group was founded by David Daleiden who is seen in the undercover sting videos using a fictional name. We speak to RH Reality Check's Sharona Coutts, who wrote the piece, "Exclu […]

The Senate is planning to vote as soon as Monday to strip Planned Parenthood of $500 million in federal funding. The vote comes as Planned Parenthood is coming under fire from anti-choice activists after the release of a series of undercover sting videos were published online. The heavily edited videos suggest the organization profits from supplying aborted […]

In Portland, Oregon, law enforcement officers have removed Greenpeace activists who spent 40 hours suspended from the St. Johns Bridge in order to block an icebreaking ship commissioned by oil giant Shell from leaving for the Arctic. Hundreds of activists have been gathering on the bridge and in kayaks since Tuesday night in efforts to stop Shell's plan […]

On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Drake, a former Senior Executive at the National Security Agency, says he was targeted by the NSA because he exposed that the agency had intel that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks and because he blew the whistle on a massive secret surveillance program aimed at Americans

James K. Gailbraith says, IMF is demanding a substantial reduction of the Greek debt to participate in any new deal and meanwhile German law makers are refusing to approve a new bail-out without the IMF

James K. Galbraith a member of the working group advising the former finance minister Varoufakis on 'Plan B' says there were great impositions imposed on the Greek government including certain procedures that removed control from the government and placed them in the hands of creditor institutions

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Donald Trump, the man to beat in this week's first televised Republican presidential debate, said on Sunday he does not plan to attack his rivals and downplayed expectations for his performance, saying "I'm not a debater."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. backers of the Iran nuclear deal are increasingly confident of enough Democratic support to ensure it survives review by Congress, despite fierce opposition by majority Republicans and a massive lobbying drive.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will unveil on Monday the final version of his plan to tackle greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants, kicking off what is expected to be a tumultuous legal battle against federal environmental regulators by the coal industry and its political allies.

Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.